Why Python 3?

[Christian Heimes]

A.T.Hofkamp wrote:
> Well, Python 3 design is from the ground up, and aimed at the future, so they
> are quite a few steps ahead of today's coding practice, let alone today's code
> base (which is still 1.5 compatible as you discovered).

Just a small note from me:

Several people think that we are rewriting Python 3.0 from the scratch.
That is *not* correct. The 3.x series shares lots of code with the 2.x
series. We are still merging changes from the trunk (2.6) into the py3k
branch and we are going to backport several features from 3.0 into 2.6.

Some parts are of Python 3.0 are new and the majority of the rest is
just cleaned up a bit. Some new features like the new immutable bytes
type in 3.0a2 are mostly based on existing code.

At http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html Joel
explains why rewriting from the scratch is often the worst strategy.

Christian